The Xcode 4 Cookbook provides you with the skills and knowledge, and practical recipes on how to go about developing useful applications that can be used within the industry. By using this cookbook's step-by-step style approach, presenting examples in the style of recipes, allowing you to go directly to your topic of interest, or follow topics throughout a chapter to gain in-depth knowledge, you will gain the skills needed to develop some stunning applications.
This cookbook is a practical guide featuring over 100 recipes that show you how to build your own fun and exciting iOS applications by integrating iCloud, Facebook, Mobile core services, Core Image and Media Player Frameworks, and the Core Graphics and Core Motion frameworks, that will enable you to enhance your applications to create some amazing image and transition effects using the built-in image filters.
In this book, I have tried my best to keep the code simple and easy to understand. I have provided step-by-step instructions with loads of screenshots at each step to make it easier to follow. You will soon be mastering the different aspects of iOS 6 programming, as well as mastering the technology and skills needed to create some stunning applications.
Feel free to contact me at <[email protected]> for any queries, or if you just want to drop by and say "Hello". Any suggestions for improving this book will be highly regarded.
Chapter 1, Getting and Installing the iOS SDK Development Tools, introduces the developer to the Xcode developer set of tools, as well as the capabilities of the iOS Simulator and each of the layers contained within the iOS architecture, before finally looking at how to create a simple Hello World iOS application.
Chapter 2, User Interfaces – Creating the UI, introduces the concept of views and how they are part of a complete iOS application. Exploring a large number of various view components, you will create different applications that will help you understand how each component works. We will also learn about the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern and how to use it to create applications suitable for enhanced user experience. Through this chapter, you will also learn about the most useful controllers, which will be part of many of your projects in the future.
Chapter 3, Using Storyboards, gains an understanding of what Storyboards are and how we can apply the various transitions between views. We will take a look into how we are able to create and configure scenes and storyboard files, to present these programmatically. Finally, we will learn how to integrate Twitter capabilities into our application to tweet photos and standard messages using the new iOS 6 Social frameworks.
Chapter 4, Using Xcode Instruments, focuses on how to effectively use Instruments within our applications to track down memory leaks and eliminate bottlenecks that could potentially cause our application to crash on the user's iOS device. We will also take a look at how to add and configure instruments, as well as learn how to use the System Trace Instrument to monitor system calls and track down performance issues within the application.
Chapter 5, Working with the Location Services and the MapKit Frameworks, introduces a detailed guide for using the built-in location services to create applications that provide location information to the user. You will not only learn how to use the GPS hardware, but also how to display maps and layout information using Overlays.
Chapter 6, Storing Documents within the Cloud, introduces you to the benefits of using iCloud, and how to incorporate iCloud functionality into your applications to store and retrieve files, and its data through the use of the Storage APIs. This chapter will also give you some insight into how to go about handling file version conflicts when multiple copies of the same file are being updated on more than one iOS device.
Chapter 7, Working with the Different Multimedia Resources, focuses on teaching you to create applications that capture, reproduce, and manage multimedia content through the device's hardware. You will not only learn to use the camera to capture images and videos but also how to play back and record audio. We will also learn how to implement the different image filter effects and transition animations to produce a water ripple effect, as well as learning how to incorporate Airplay functionality into our application.
Chapter 8, Working with the CoreData and GameKit Frameworks, focuses on showing you how to use the Core Data framework to create a simple Books Library application, to directly interface with a SQLite database, to create and store book details. We will also look at how to incorporate Bluetooth functionality, so that you can send book details to another iOS device, and have this information received wirelessly and stored within the database at the other end.
Chapter 9, Creating a Social Networking App with the Facebook iOS SDK, shows you how to download the Facebook SDK and register your application with Facebook. It also shows you how to use the Facebook APIs to integrate Facebook functionality into your app, using the Single Sign On (SSO) feature. This provides users the ability to sign into your application using their Facebook identity, so that they can submit notification requests, or submit content to their wall. We will learn how to use the Open Graph API and Facebook Query Language (FQL) to pass SQL Query like syntax to retrieve information about the current user, and learn how to cleanly handle Facebook errors within our iOS applications.
Chapter 10, Packaging and Deploying Your Application, walks you through the required steps to deploy your finished application to devices, as well as showing you how to prepare and distribute it to the App Store. We will also take a look at how to create and obtain provisioning profiles for both development and distribution.
Appendix, Exploring the MultiTouch Interface, discusses how to create applications that are fully aware of their surrounding environment, through the device's sensors. You will learn to adjust the user interface according to device orientations and how to respond to accelerometer and gyroscope events. You will also learn about the built-in shake gesture, and how to go about responding to the shake motions.